1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data centers. More particularly, the present invention relates to managing modification of configuration states of resources in a dynamic data center.
2. Related Art
Today, there are many types of firmware, operating systems, and applications that can be utilized in various types of computational devices. The configuration state of a computational device represents the firmware, operating system, and applications installed in the computational device, as well as the values for customer-specifiable operational parameters of the device. Typically, modifications to the firmware, operating systems, and applications are periodically released. These modifications can be classified as an update, a patch, a fix, or an upgrade. For example, a security patch may be released to address a security vulnerability of an operating system. After performing the modification to the configuration state of the computational device, it may be necessary to reboot the computational device. Maintaining the configuration state of one computational device as modifications are made available is a manageable task.
However, in a data center environment, this task is difficult and tedious for a data center administrator. The data center may have 100's or 1000's of resources that are providing a service. For example, the service may be a web site operation. Typically, there are various types of resources. Examples of these various types of resources include a first web server having a first type of operating system, a second web server having a second type of operating system, a load balancer, and a firewall. When a new modification for the configuration state of a particular type of resource is made available, the data center administrator has to manually perform the modification to the configuration state of each resource of the particular type, leading to inefficient use of time. Moreover, since the resource may have to be taken offline before performing the modification to the configuration state of the resource or may have to be rebooted after performing the modification to the configuration state of the resource, the level of service provided by the resource is negatively affected.